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More control for one. Flash is essentially a self contained program running in your browser. HTML5 will allow things like audio volume per tab, or per domain, more interaction between the page itself, the content, and the user.

The fact it's self-contained doesn't mean it's isolated from the page. It's in fact a benefit, because it quickly becomes a burden to serve your app as a hundred of tiny images and js files. The "minification" and "sprite" techniques the community is forced to use in JS/HTML/CSS apps, are tedious, limited and just a poor-man's compilation technique, a sign that in practice a compressed one-off-download container is the better choice for web apps.

There is also fast two-way connection between JS and Flash that works in all browsers today. Anything the browser provides as settings and per-tab controls and so on, which is accessible to JavaScript/DOM, is accessible to Flash as well. As an example of this feature in action, you can see the HTML5 features like canvas and SVG implemented transparently via Flash. You can also use most of the essential Flash features directly from JavaScript with libraries like Aflax.

Here's a fantastic example of the sorts of things this'll make possible, which simply can't be done with flash: http://www.double.co.nz/video_test/video.svg [double.co.nz]

Would you care to elaborate what is in that demo that Flash can't easily top today. I see scalable rotatable rectangles with transluccent video in them. Nothing Flash couldn't do few years ago. Today, in Flash you can also map videos like that on waving flags in 3D space or have full-blown alpha mask for dynamic compositing, if you wish. I shouldn't need to mention also that Flash provides consistent codec support (including H264/AAC) on all platforms and browsers in turns on, today. All this while even non-MS browser makers can't agree on a common codec to use (let alone Microsoft joining them any time soon).

You have true 3D engines with shader support or full-blown music synthesis and sequencing applications built directly on top of the flash platform.

All in all, most arguments against Flash I've seen, are arguments out of ignorance and bias. I would be the first to call out a poor use of Flash when I see one, but it works the other way too. In the end, can't we have both instead of either? Who stands to win by "eliminating" either option when they both fill different, though partially overlapping roles?

> Now all they have to do is make it so, when you make a web site in Flash, you can link directly to the "page" you want.

Flex Builder 3 has support for deep links (they were possible before, but now it's in the framework), so a link from a search result directly to the searched item should be possible.

You may want to take a closer look at why Flash is slow for you. The player is really fast. It's a decent virtual machine and graphics engine. If you have a flash 9 plugin, take a look at this page: http://papervision3d.org/ It's a 3d engine with texturing support that's usable on a current computer. It is impossible to touch that performance using a web browser without plugins. Flash is only slow if it's used in a stupid way (playing multiple video ads on a page) or programmed for by incompetent people (hobby coders, designers).

I believe that Flash is a good platform, but as long as a single company can run it all into the ground, we can't rely on it. What is really missing is an open source flash player (Gnash is not good enough, I want Adobe to open up the player).

That's bull.

With the increasing number of Flex developers and Flash developers switching over to AS3 and the Flash 9 AVM2 engine, you sir, are talking out of your ass.

Check out all those flash sites that use papervision3d, a 3D software renderer for Flash. That's all Flash 9 AS3.

Picking up is not no one. There's a lot of demand for Flex developers right now (output = Flash 9 AVM2) and it's growing as an alternative to AJAX because AJAX eats a crapload of bandwidth since the Javascript code and XML aren't compressed. Moreover, your front-end code is visible in AJAX.

Because Flash can't do 3D.

Silverlight doesn't support any of the 3D subsystem of .NET's WPF. It's 2D only, and software only.

For Flash, there are some fairly advanced 3D engines like PaperVision3D, which comes complete with such features like cell shaders, bumping and reflection map effects, rich material and scene handling API-s, support for 3DS and Collada objects and animations and so on.

Demos here. Check the rhino and Earth demo too :)

What does Silverlight have to compete with this? Nothing. Maybe one day Silverlight will outdo Flash, and I'll gladly use it's suitable for a scenario. Right now, Flash beats it in almost all categories, including, yes, 3D.

To expostulate, if you have a computer with a Pentium 4 or newer CPU, as a Flash developer you can use the high performance Papervision 3D, or if you want max details, there is Away3D, and then the original Sandy. When you say "sufficiently advanced" that's a very subjective term, as some of the websites using these 3D API's are quite advanced compared to other websites built in a different technology, such as Java or Microsoft's Silverlight. If you had said "sufficiently advanced" and compared it to something like 3D done by modern computer games or a video game console such as the Sony Playstation 2, then yes, Flash is still a ways off, but these 3D engines for Flash 9 combined with the JIT compiling that Actionscript 3 uses, is what I would call sufficiently advanced compared to Actionscript 2 (interpreted), for example.

PaperVision 3D and Away3D spring to mind.

Papervision is a nice alternative to the MS offering.

http://digitalurban.blogspot.com/search?q=papervision

Watch the youtube video.

writing shitty players with security holes

they're still software rendering graphics in year of 2007

b) It's still interpretated as a virtual machine, so it's not native system performance

Actually, ActionScript 3 (introduced in Flash Player 9) is a JIT with excellent performance... not interpreted.

Your other points are valid, but you can still get impressive performance, e.g.,

http://www.papervision3d.org/
http://www.unitzeroone.com/blog/papervision3d/pape rvision3d_demos_cellshadin.html

like it or not, flash is the standard for web animation and its growing.

it's cross platorm, immensely powerful and there is a fast growing open source community behind it - (http://blog.papervision3d.org/, http://osflash.org/)

you can crap on ad nauseum about svg and the like but no ones' listening.

The data I had for hostip.info was 1-pixel-per-kilometre. This new data is twice that resolution, and if I combine this new data with the soon-to-be-open-source 3d engine in Flash, I think it'd be really cool. Geolocate yourself or anyone else by their IP, then zoom around that location in 3d :-)

Sounds like a fun thing to put together - maybe this weekend for the 2D stuff, and as soon as the 3D engine is open-source, I'll include that :-)

As always with this sort of thing, it's getting hold of the data that's the hard part - kudos to those giving it away free to research, education, and me :-)

Simon